Canadian Web Hosting customers frequently ask us how they can improve reliability or streamline their services to “localize” their websites so customers can access their site from a server that is geographically closer to them. Our customers don’t always realize that there is a way to launch servers in Vancouver, BC and Toronto, ON and have their servers leverage the same IP address. It’s called Anycast.

Anycast uses routing and addressing policies to affect the most efficient path between a single source and several geographically dispersed targets that "listen" to a service within a receiver group. In laymen’s terms, you can have servers in geographically separated locations and utilize a single IP for these servers. In Anycast, the same IP address space is then used to address each of the listening (server) targets, and then layer 3 routing will handle the transmission of packets from the source to its most appropriate (server) target. The graphic below shows that if you have two geographically separated locations and host dedicated servers in each location, Anycast will distribute customers to the closest servers and help minimize latency and improve overall customer usability.

For our Canadian Web Hosting customers, Anycast provides a fast and efficient method to leverage geo-dispersed servers. More importantly, Anycast can deliver “enterprise” grade networking to help you keep your site online. If you look at the following benefits table, Anycast can help automatically loadbalance your servers, improve reliability, provide protection against DDoS, and most importantly in the event that a server node goes down, Anycast will remove that node and automatically route traffic to the live server.